How do we know new school ratings are better than the old ones? PennLive letters

This is a follow up to your Dec, 12 front page article, “How Does Your School Stack Up?” (Editor's note: online version here.)

On October 4, 2013, the Pennsylvania Department of Education released this new School Performance Profile, which supposedly shows the academic performance of the state’s public schools. With the waiver granted by the federal government, this new profile effectively eliminates the “adequate yearly progress” designation and the potential consequences for schools not reaching the benchmarks in the federal “No Child Left Behind” program — a mandate Pennsylvania has followed for years as the price of accepting billions of federal dollars.

Why are we doing this without first testing the new system before dropping the former system? Normally, in industry, business, medicine, military and academic institutions innovations and new programs are usually tested before they are put into play.

Is this another waste of taxpayer money? Is this another government mess, albeit in state government, like the flawed “Affordable Care Act” roll out?